Current systems lack the ability to capture to-scale human body avatars, extract precise body measurements, and securely store and aggregate and process that data for the purpose of data dissemination over on the Internet. In the past, if a person wanted to capture body measurements, he or she would have to either wrap a tape measure around his or her body parts, write down those measurements, and then find a way to store and track those measurements. A person would do this to get fitted for clothing, assess his or her health based on their body measurements, track his or her body measurement changes over time, or some other application that used his or her measurements. This process is very error prone, is not precisely repeatable, and these measurements are not stored on connected servers where the information is accessible and the user cannot track his or her changes. In addition, there is no system that can capture these body measurements and then generate a to-scale human body avatar.
There are a number of existing body scanning systems. For example, TC-2 (NX-16 and KX-16), Vitus (Smart XXL), Styku (MeasureMe), BodyMetrics and Me-Ality are examples of these existing body scanning systems. Each of these systems is a body scanner where the user stands still in a spread pose and the system then create body contour maps based on depth sensors, white light projectors and cameras, or lasers. These systems then use those body contour maps (avatars) to extract measurements about the user. In each case, the body scanners is used to extract measurements for the purposes of clothing fitting or to create an avatar that the user can play with. Each of these known systems is extremely complicated expensive and therefore cannot be distributed widely to the mainstream markets. Furthermore, none of the aforementioned systems offer an online storage facility for the data captured and users can simply use the measurements at the store that houses the scanner. Another missing component in these systems is data aggregation from each of these scanning systems.
There are also a number of existing companies that allow users to enter body measurement data online. These companies include healthehuman, weightbydate, trackmybody, Visual Fitness Planner, Fitbit, and Withings and all of these companies allow users to manually enter their body measurements using their online platforms. These companies are mainly focused on the following girth measurements because they are easily accessible: neck, shoulders, chest, waist, hips, left and right biceps, elbows, forearms, wrists, thighs, knees, calves, and ankles. These systems allow the user to track these measurements over time. These companies do not solve the problem because user measurements are extremely subjective, therefore accuracy cannot be determined, user measurements are not repeatable, and therefore cannot be used to form trends. Furthermore, users that have hundreds of additional measurements cannot be manually captured and therefore are not included in the aforementioned company's trend analysis. Also, average users that have extremely short attention spans generally do not want to capture measurement with a tape measure and then input those measurements into an application. This process is time consuming and error prone. Therefore time is a large problem for the current sets of solutions.